Semua Bab The Don’s Secret Obsession : Bab 111 - Bab 120

By the second night after the attack, the estate had become a different organism.Rooms that had once been walked without thought now required verbal clearance. Faces that had been familiar for years were re-examined in passing. Victor’s sweep did not move quietly — it was designed not to. Paranoia was a tool. If the spy felt the walls closing, they would make a mistake. If they did not, the pressure would still strip away the comfort of invisibility they had relied on.Sofia walked the main corridor just after dusk and felt the change in the air like a change in weather. Staff stepped aside faster. Conversations died when she approached. The house was afraid of itself. She did not soften that fear. Fear made people careful. Careful people survived.Luca met her at the top of the east staircase. The private distance between them had not vanished, but it had been forced into a narrower channel by the shared necessity of keeping the family breathing.“Victor has three more names from th

The woman with the ninety-minute gap broke at 5:12 a.m.Her name was Caterina Lowe. Forty-one. Temporary medical records support. Soft-spoken. The kind of face that disappeared into administrative corridors without leaving a trace. For the first two hours she held to a story about a migraine and a dark supply closet. At the two-hour mark Sofia entered the room alone, placed Tomas’s duty photograph on the table, and asked her to look at it while she repeated the story.Caterina looked at the dead man’s face. Something in her throat closed. The migraine story collapsed in pieces — first the closet, then the timing, then the reason she had needed to be invisible during that exact window.She had not opened the medical entrance.She had unlocked the credential terminal that allowed someone else to.“I was told it was a systems test,” she whispered. The words came out ruined. “A woman from internal audit. She had the codes. She said the terminal needed a manual override window for a compli

Mira Schenk talked because the alternative was worse.By noon she had given them the structure of the channel — the code bands, the dead-drop protocol, the rotation of junior doors she had used and discarded. She gave them the method by which Tomas’s entrance had been opened. She gave them the precise order Eros had sent after the first breach failed: the child does not leave that house alive. She did not give them remorse. When Sofia asked if she understood what she had attempted, Mira looked at her with flat, exhausted eyes and said only, “I understood the assignment.”Sofia listened to all of it without interruption. When the first full account was finished, she stood, smoothed the front of her blouse, and spoke to Victor in a voice that carried no heat and no mercy.“She remains alive. She remains useful until every name and every method is verified. After that, I will decide what usefulness is worth. Giovanni gets his hour once the medical team clears her for it. Not before.”Vic

The residual names from Mira Schenk’s account produced seven active contacts by the following morning.Victor laid the list on the study table without ceremony. Three were mid-level logistics men still attempting to move product under old flags. Two were financial cutouts operating through shell entities in secondary European cities. One was a former documentation specialist who had gone to ground after Varga’s disappearance. The last was a woman who had handled safe-house rotations for the network’s remaining field operators — a name Giovanni recognized immediately.Sofia read the list once. Luca read it beside her. Dante stood at the window. Romano remained seated, silent, measuring the cost of what the next days would require.“We take them in sequence,” Sofia said. “No simultaneous strikes that stretch us thin. Logistics first — they are the most likely to run when the first door closes. Financial cutouts second. The safe-house coordinator last. Giovanni will want that one. He can

The final financial cutout was taken in Lisbon just after sunrise.Victor’s team moved on a narrow apartment above a closed bakery in the Alfama district. The man inside — a Portuguese intermediary named Rojas who had specialized in dissolving shell entities under pressure — attempted to run the rear staircase and found it already covered. He was brought out in restraints with a laptop and a set of encrypted drives that Victor’s technical people began processing before the plane back to Italy had even reached altitude.By early afternoon the drives had confirmed what Mira Schenk and Marta Kehl had already suggested in pieces: the residual network’s financial spine was broken. The remaining accounts were either frozen, emptied, or already abandoned. There were no further clean routes. No secondary war chest waiting for a rebuild. The structure Eros had left behind was, for the first time, truly inert.Sofia received the report in the study with Luca present. She read the summary twice,